Innovation + experience-minded design strategy. The pieces of a working model for understanding culture + change in an increasingly complex world.
If it Was My Home is a simple but effective concept. Enter your location, and the oil spill is overlayed on top. It's gotten to the point where the area the spill covers is greater than the area of some states. Scared? You should be.
The above work is work of the Artist, using existing tools to tell a story that inspires thinking and action.
(referencing One model for thinking about roles and relationships: Philosopher/Scientist/Entrepreneur/Artist)
I got to thinking that this might be a good time to shed some light on how the Philosopher/Scientist/Entrepreneur/Artist paradigm helps guide my thinking about these things:
Not too long ago I was saying that I tend not to worry about people stealing my ideas: (a few thoughts on the 'perfect' idea). It started with highlighting someone who had mentioned the concept that "for every idea you come up with, there are probably ten other people in the world executing that same idea."
This manifests itself in the above, and in many other spheres as well. I know a guy who is building a service that lets you quickly and easily send money to friends via text message. It's a great concept, very useful in split-check situations - I know this because I also already use an app that lets me do the same thing. I also know there are a number of other services that are working to do the same thing.
This is the challenge of the Entrepreneur. For any given idea, there are a number of strikingly similar ideas addressing the same thing.
When talking about the "few thoughts on the perfect idea" post above, @calebkramer offered the following perspective: many people think of developing the same idea, but there is such a thing as executing the same idea better than others.
When thinking about Placepop/foursquare with the natural questions of "how are these different, what makes one better than the other, what the point of differentiation, etc," I came to think of Caleb's thought as the "build a better mousetrap" paradigm.
So getting back to the original thought on how PSEA helps guide my thinking. It helps me to think the following, and perhaps you can draw your own parallels to either location-based services or something else:
Entrepreneur works to build a better mousetrap
Artist takes multiple mousetraps and puts them on display somewhere to make a statement about catching mice
Philosopher asks why we even need mousetraps to begin with & feel that having mice is a bad thing
Scientist studies, measures, and publishes the effects of humans interacting with mice
Entrepreneur uses new information to build a better ??? (depends on what direction the world goes from the A->P->S evolution)
Etc.
Hello friends and collaborators. I deal in innovation, working to build fantastic experiences enabled by the digital world. As part of this I track cultural change, primarily through observations guided by models and filters calibrated over years to sort out the cream.
These pieces of thoughts here reflect concepts that are elements of those models: ecosystem thinking, long-term value, information filters, and pattern recognition.
("How to break anything" is an abstract notion that reflects my background in observation and analysis. Rules are meant to be broken, but only through understanding the rules - observing them with an empathetic eye - can they be broken constructively.
So how to break anything? Observe everything.
[You can't observe everything so how do you know what to observe? That's another project that I call Filter Theory - see the About link above.])
